Addition by subtraction?

Yesterday, we deleted 13 companies and their 44,000 jobs from the ZenSearch database.

You might wonder why we'd do that.

I questioned it myself. After all, I've spent countless hours searching for companies to add, especially ones with more than 10 open roles. And here we were, removing companies with thousands.

So why delete them?

Our vision at ZenSearch is to be the best job search tool for technology related roles. These companies and their jobs didn't align with that focus.

As valuable as nurse aides and pizza delivery people are, they aren't a good match for our users. Those jobs are uncategorized, making them challenging to find, and no one was looking for them anyway.

Worse, ingesting and parsing thousands of unused jobs and their descriptions was incredibly slow, burdened our server, and caused errors that disrupted the import process for jobs people wanted.

Now they're gone, and today everything ran much more smoothly and quickly.

Are you doing the same thing with your job search?

Are you going after volume and applying to jobs that barely match what you're looking for? Are you searching for roles in industries you find boring? Are you wasting time on applications you don't care about?

Stop doing that.

I know, the job market is bad. Maybe you've been looking for a long time and just want a job—any job. But think about what will happen if you get a job you aren't suited for or one that goes against something important to you. That's bad too.

Consider if applying to jobs you know you'd be miserable in is worth the effort or if subtracting them from your application pool adds to your happiness.

ZenSearch is better off without empty jobs draining our resources. I think you will be too.

Check us out at ZenSearch.jobs and share our platform with anyone looking for something new. Together, we can make job searching a little more zen.